If you’re Bihari, 40 — as actor Avinash Tiwary is — lemme hazard a guess. You’ll have an uncle called ‘Pappu Mama’! As does Avinash. Pappu Mama is also actor Manoj Bajpayee’s old friend. Except that while Avinash had dropped out of engg. college to take up acting, he’d hear stories about fellow-Bihari, Manoj, from Pappu Mama — “somewhere that seeded the thought of pursuing the profession” — they only first met a couple of years ago. Manoj insisted to Pappu Mama that Avinash attend his movie preview, where he told ‘Pappu’s bhanja’: “Listen, I know all about actor-arrogance. Come over sometime. I cook great mutton(common Bihari-male speciality)!” That mutton meal, I’m told, hasn’t happened yet. This came up in my chat w/ Avinash ‘coz he’s born in Gopalganj. Tiwari-Tripathi like, say, Dubey-Dwivedi, same surname. Hence, I wished to know if Avinash was related to actor Pankaj Tripathi, instead. He’s not. The other thing that Manoj, Avinash have in common is — at some point, they trained under theatre instructor, Barry John. Avinash was 19 then. He moved to Delhi for Barry to live in a semi-shanty in Saidulajab, sharing even that tiny hole, often, w/ a “senior actor”, then 15, named Aditya Kumar, who played Perpendicular in Gangs of Wasseypur. They’d watch movies together. Avinash was to apply to Royal Academy of Drama Art in London. He went to New York Film Academy, eventually. The 1st time I saw Avinash was w/ Imtiaz Ali & others, while moderating a panel-discussion in Indore, before the film Laila Majnu (2018), that nobody’d watched yet. It didn’t occur to me he’s the same guy from the lovely, Tu Hai Mera Sunday (2016). I bumped into him later at a Bandra café, where it was equally impossible to match this cool-looking dude w/ the deviously rustic villain, Chandan Mahto, from Khakee (2022)! “It’s bizarre to call an actor, versatile — what else are they supposed to be,” Avinash reasons. That said, could resolutely immersing oneself into a character also be a detriment, when people remember roles, films so much, that they can’t instantly recall the actor himself? I ask Avinash! Watch/read chat on link in bio.